More than 90,000 classified American documents on the war in Afghanistan have
been leaked to the media by the whistle-blowers' website Wikileaks. Here is
the background to the story.

Wikileaks obtained the files, which contain a blow-by-blow account of fighting in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009, and made them available to the Guardian newspaper as well as the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel.

Julian Assange, Wikileaks' founder, informed The Guardian that Wikileaks was in possession of 92,201 internal US military records which detailed accounts of everything from enemy attacks to meetings with local politicians.

He said that the website was preparing to publish the material and decided to include The Guardian and their American and German counterparts.

The newspapers said they received the leaked material several weeks ago from the website which has become renowned in recent years for publishing classified material.

The first batch of encrypted information was made available on a secret website which The Guardian accessed with a user name and a password.

The Guardian, NYT and Der Spiegel agreed to publish stories based on that material simultaneously on Monday 26 July.

The source of the leak of the US military's internal logs is not known to the media outlets, but presumably is to Wikileaks.

Pentagon officials and the White House have condemned the leaks and have become increasingly ill at ease with Wikileaks in recent months.

America's defence department suspects that it all began in November when someone working inside a US military base in Iraq began to copy secret material.

The leaks intensified when on 5 April Mr Assange held a press conference in Washington in which he showed a video, claimed to have been filmed by someone in the US military, which appeared to show civilians and Reuters staff being shot in a Baghdad street by Apache helicopters.

In the background service personnel could apparently be heard cheering and shouting "good shooting".

The Pentagon were furious at the leak and later the following month a US intelligence analyst called Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq. The 22-year-old was charged with two counts of misconduct and faces a trial by court martial.

Mr Assange, who has become a high-profile but elusive figure, claims that the Pentagon has asked him to work with them to help stop the leaks but he has refused.

The Guardian tracked him down in Brussels earlier this year where he was addressing the European Parliament. It was there that he volunteered information that his website held tens of thousands of classified documents detailing American operations in Afghanistan.